ERIC Number: EJ907889
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2009-Aug
Pages: 17
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0311-6999
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
National Gender Equity and Schooling Policy in Australia: Struggles for a Non-Identitarian Feminist Politics
Keddie, Amanda
Australian Educational Researcher, v36 n2 p21-37 Aug 2009
This paper tracks the development of gender equity and schooling policy in Australia from the "National Policy on the Education of Girls in 1987", to current policy concerns with boys' educational underperformance. The paper's key focus is on the ways in which feminist informed equity policy has been undermined by broader imperatives of economic rationalism and anti-feminist discourses. Drawing on Nancy Fraser's understandings of distributive and cultural gender justice and her notion of a non-identitarian feminist politics, the paper critically examines the ways in which such imperatives have re-articulated equity and schooling concerns. Through these lenses, the limitations of the affirmative gender binary politics and remedies that have dominated gender and schooling reform in Australia are highlighted. The paper concludes with an illumination of the gender justice spaces currently being mobilised in Australian schools. Such spaces, it is argued, fostered within a context of increasing autonomy and self-management for schools, are providing avenues for creative and disruptive (pro)feminist activism. (Contains 2 endnotes.)
Descriptors: Criticism, Feminism, Educational Change, Foreign Countries, Sex Fairness, Vocational Education, Politics, Females, Equal Education, Educational Policy, Institutional Autonomy, Activism
Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE). P.O. Box 71, Coldstream, Victoria 3770, Australia. Tel: +61-0359-649-031; Fax: +61-0359-649-586; e-mail: aare@aare.edu.au; Web site: http://www.aare.edu.au
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Elementary Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Australia
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A